I have been writing this musical patchwork quilt of a memoir for over a year now and somehow not mentioned Elvis Costello. I hold his work in the very highest esteem, and have loyally bought his LPs as they are released, with The Attractions, or other collaborations : singing country, classical, pop, jazz-stylings, americana or urbana, rock or baroque, rockabilly or punk, crooning or spitting. His output is fecund, his quality high. I really like most of it, dislike very little and absolutely love a great deal of his work. I have seen him live at least thirteen times over the years, in Brighton, London, Santa Barbara and New York. When I was younger and living in North London, my brother Andrew was at Middlesex College and going out with Debbie whom he’d known since school and who was at least as big an Elvis Costello fan as I – in fact we went to a few gigs together. Debbie would always appear in the street afterwards, joining me having a fag, clutching a set-list which she’d snaffled for herself or from a kindly roadie. I wonder if these treasures are stored somewhere?

It is now possible to access one’s live music memories via a website : setlist.org. They don’t have the hand-scrawled mementos though. I have quite a few set-lists myself from different eras, in particular the Brian Wilson band era of the early 21st century. And then sometimes I lose interest in ephemera and just want the musical memories. Unfortunately this approach has the downfall of being as ambiguous as your own memory. Will you remember every song that you saw live? Of course you bloody won’t !

It’s a damn shame, but I have had to face my fading life-story as I write it down, trying to pin wraiths up in a smoky room, nailing down wisps of certainty amidst clouds of doubt. Others have helped – remembering things that have long gone, gigs, bands I’ve played in, moments, triumphs, disasters. I try to treat these two imposters both the same of course, but I prefer the triumphs. Just a little secret. But in writing this series of blogs the disasters have often been better pieces of writing. Perhaps each entry should contain healthy selections of both.

Last night I went to see Elvis Costello again, but this time he was in conversation with old friend Roseanne Cash, talking about his newly-published autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink at BAM in Brooklyn. His pop life in fact. I’m half-way through reading the 700 pages as I write and it is a hugely enjoyable journey through his life and work, non-linear also, joining different moments together from different times, using music to trigger images, constantly relating asides about singers, songs, lyrics, musical pick-n-mix reminiscenses about listening to the radio, meeting your idols, playing Top of the Pops or playing a gig to three people and a dog. His father is prominent, so is Liverpool, and there is a fine sense of musical history running throughout the narrative. Costello comes across as an uber-fan as much as anything, his encyclopaedic knowledge of other people’s work is infectious and inspiring. You can hear his appreciation in his songs, almost thirty years of quoting others among his own razor-sharp and original lyrics.

As a lyricist I don’t think Costello can be surpassed. I would actually place him above Bob Dylan in that respect. I remember when I was playing in Steven Berkoff’s “West” at the Donmar Warehouse in London over the summer of 1983, we would get rumours of “who was in tonight” trickling back to the dressing room. One night fellow thespian Bruce Payne came into the brightly-lit mirrored space and slyly remarked that ‘the greatest living poet was in the audience tonight’. My agent was a strange creature, and I was young and green, because I never did the requisite moving and shaking during this summer to increase my career prospects. We had all kinds of people watching the show, I guess we were the hot ticket, but for me that was enough. I’m not a natural hustler. I just like doing the work. Hustlers always do better, get further, climb higher. It’s a natural fact of life. It doesn’t mean that they’re less talented, although if you have small talent you clearly need to hustle, no, it just means they have that aspect of their personality to the front and centre.

I got to the theatre last-minute as ever. It had been raining all day, and my friend Johanna and I had been out driving around looking at thrift shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan, we must have walked into at least ten that afternoon, and come home with two inappropriate tables, no teapots and a rather beautiful black piano in my sights. Johanna reminded me to take my book as she dropped me home. It was still raining as I stepped into the theater (sp) and bought a ticket. No book thanks. Got one. And into the auditorium.

BAM is a series of performance spaces including a cinema and a beautiful old opera house. We’d seen Youssou N’Dour there last year with the entire Senegalese population of New York City. A film was playing as I walked in, a film of Allen Toussaint playing the piano, and Elvis Costello singing “The Greatest Love“. One day earlier, Toussaint had died in Madrid aged just 77 as he toured Europe with his quintet. A giant of New Orleans music as a session player, songwriter (Coalmine, Ride Your Pony, Fortune Teller, Southern Nights) and producer (The Meters, Labelle’s Lady Marmalade, Dr John etc) he and Elvis Costello collaborated on an LP together after playing benefit concerts for the Katrina tragedy which almost finished New Orleans.

The River In Reverse is a wonderful record which was released in 2006 and is a fine chapter in both musician’s output.

Declan McManus with a photo of his father, Ross McManus

Then Elvis and Roseanne Cash came onstage and spoke for about two hours about the autobiography which Elvis read some passages from, notably about – his own father’s death, seeing Desmond Dekker onstage miming his hit Israelites in 1975 (see My Pop Life #102 ) working with Allen Toussaint, songwriting, showbusiness and family, but mainly and always about music music music about which Elvis is an unending stream of knowledge and enthusiasm. By way of illustration of his songwriting technique he picked up an acoustic guitar and gave us a rendition of Shipbuilding which he tied into a story about the evacuation of children to Canada during the 2nd World War, a ship leaving Liverpool without his mother on board which was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic, most of the children dying of hypothermia in the lifeboats after they had been picked up. Diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls. Then he played a brittle precise acoustic arrangement of one of the most exciting songs in his back catalogue, the song I’ve chosen to select from his vast library of evocations : Beyond Belief.

Lyrically astounding and musically powerful, it opens the bejewelled and baroque collection of songs he entitled Imperial Bedroom. The mighty fifth album.

My previous favourite EC record – 1980’s ‘Get Happy‘ – was a stunning collection of songs all played in the style of Stax house band Booker T & the MGs with a bit of Muscle Shoals and Willie Mitchell thrown in for good measure – it was a mod album, white boys playing post-punk soul shapes with bitter intelligent lyrics. Imperial Bedroom though was pure pop, horn sectioned, string-arranged, harmony-vocalised pop music and a mightily rich and ornate musical statement as you could find in 1982. When it came out I was touring England in a Ford Transit van with socialist/feminist theatre group Moving Parts, acting and playing music in self-written pieces ‘with a discussion afterwards‘, changing the world one unemployment drop-in centre at a time. We were in Scunthorpe, Nottingham, South Yorkshire, Leicester, Newcastle, London, up and down the M1. We played songs in the style of Adam and The Ants & Madness, The Undertones & Dexys (see My Pop Life #25) while snotty-nosed kids threw polo mints at us because we’d shut down the pool table and assembled a wonky wooden set with crap PA and toy drum kit in the centre. There was racism, threats and boredom, but there was also much fantastic connection, and every day was actually a thrill.

When this LP Imperial Bedroom came out I think I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever heard. The band were outstandingly good – Pete Thomas on the drum-kit had gone to my school but been slightly older and cooler than I, and has remained out of reach for the remainder of my life. Bruce Thomas was on bass guitar with his high-fret jumping lines which elevate each turnaround, and Steve Nieve (a punk affectation but no more than “Elvis Costello“!!) played all the keyboards and arranged the orchestral parts – his contribution doing the most to place the LP in the category of adorned pop masterpieces where it happily sits to this day.

When you hear the songs that they recorded and rejected for the final cut – stuff like the brilliant ‘Heathen Town‘ and the title track – it is no surprise that there isn’t a bad track on the record. “Just like the canals of Mars and the Great Barrier Reef, I come to you beyond belief”.

Elvis Costello & Roseane Cash: 10th November 2015

Roseanne and Elvis did a number together which I didn’t know called April 5th co-written by Kris Kristofferson, then it was over. My hardback copy of the book was heavy in my black crombie pocket as I established that there would be no book signing in the foyer that night – all the onsale copies were already signed – but mine wasn’t so I sought out the Stage Door. It was still raining and I went the long way around. Eventually I was told to wait, and sure enough there was Caroline Clipboard from Artist’s Services asking for my name after I’d let her know that I wasn’t on the list. I told her it. Perhaps he’d know who I was. Other guests were listed and went in. A handful of hopefuls waited as people came and went. Some gave up. Caroline Clipboard kept appearing and she got progressively ruder each time she came down. “He’s not doing any signings tonight” she said at one point, giving me what she thought was a withering look after I’d been waiting 25 minutes and the security guard had waved me away from the covered vestibule into the rain because I was smoking a cigarette. Eventually everyone gave up and went into the rain. I stayed. Walking home would’ve felt bad at this point. Miserable book-clutching rain-soaked twat approached in my imagination. I felt like Billy Stage-Door, the middle-aged loser who wants a quick word with the object of his fandom. And indeed I decided to inhabit this person. It was just true. I would just wait, and sooner or later he’d come out. It was risky because he might’ve been even ruder than Clipboard Cow, and withered me with a proper withering look, and then I’d have been forced to hate him forever. Yes, it was risky. But I knew he wouldn’t. And I knew he’d come out.

And he did. I said “Elvis,” and he turned and looked at me – a man who looked a little like him with the same jaunty hat and black-frame glasses approaching 60, and he said “Yes?“. I said “They wouldn’t let me upstairs, so I waited down here.” He asked me who I was and I told him my name and said I was an actor. He said “I’m sorry they didn’t let you upstairs” and I said that they were just doing their job. I said I just wanted to say Thank You For The Music but I didn’t mention Abba. He was charming and sweet. We briefly discussed Withnail, The Crying Game and The Boat That Rocked (“there’s a better film to be made of that story“) then he signed my book, we shook hands and we parted company. “See you further down the line” he said. Funny that. It’s something I say. Still a hero. Phew.

I worked out that he’d probably seen me, on stage and in films, about the same number of times that I’d seen him over the 35 years or so of our careers. About 13. Doesn’t really matter. I’d like to think though, that given time and space we’d get on. We have mutual friends and acquaintances. Alan Bleasdale. Andrew Ranken. Bound to be others. But. He hasn’t listened to any of my albums though. I don’t have any albums.